Hello everyone, I hope you are being safe and having a great summer.

The demo we made public during Steam Next Fest last month was a great success. Thousands have played the demo and almost 200,000 unique viewers have watched the stream, which one time even hit the Steam front page. 

We received a lot of useful feedback and enthusiasm from both players and developers:

It’s your patience and support that helped us get this far, so please accept my heartfelt thanks.

TUTORIAL

The one thing that the feedback made clear is that people get really immersed in the experience and really want to understand all the nuances of the game rules.

So that’s what our new updated demo gives you: a detailed tutorial and completely rewritten tooltips, leaving no aspect of the design unexplained.

Here is a small example of exposing the automatic resistance to emotion impulses game mechanic evaluation, that is happening behind the scenes:

The tutorial texts explaining the basics concepts
And the tooltips explain precisely how things get calculated…
…and what each of your character attributes is and what it does.

Dice rolls in Sacred Fire determine not only success or failure, but also how big a success or how hard a fail it was your action ended up being, ensuring variety in the results.

RULESET AND UI IMPROVEMENTS

Another area we addressed was to improve the game difficulty and re-balance the character creation presets so that they all present a valid, equally strong winning strategy.

The warrior can use the game many duels to gain renown, respect, and influence.
The elder can use memorability and people skills to climb the social ladder.
And the hunter’s advantage lies in his patience: higher resistances and willpower, giving an edge in all conflict.

Of course you can still create your own custom character with a new re-balanced ruleset encouraging role-playing.

One of the most surprising improvements to the game for me was when people asked for support for ultra-wide monitors.

Adding native support wasn’t easy, but I was surprised how well it fits the game.  It’s a more cinematic look for the story scenes and the extra room makes for a neat look in the UI screens:

WHAT’S NEXT AND PLEASE LEAVE FEEDBACK

As we prepare for the Early Access launch later this year, for better role-playing, I’ll focus on adding more character customization and variety with more hairstyles, outfits, poses, expression, and coloring.

If you get a chance to play the new demo, please let me know what you think about the new tutorials and tooltips and how easy it was for you to feel like you understand all the nuances of the game.

Thank you, and have a great summer!

Kind regards,

Andrej

Blog